The sky over our street had that flat, washed-out grey it gets in late October, the kind that makes the porch lights look yellow and tired. I was already pulling on my coat when Emmett tossed me his keys from the kitchen counter without looking up from his phone.
"Take mine," he said. "Yours is low on gas."
I caught the keys. "Thanks."
He didn't answer. He hadn't really answered me in months, if I was being honest. He gave responses. There's a difference.
Mac was on the rug with his coloring book, head bent, tongue between his teeth. Mom was asleep in the back room, her oxygen humming the same soft rhythm it always did. I told Mac I'd be back in twenty minutes with his cough syrup. He held up a green crayon like a small salute.
Emmett's car still smelled like him—the cedar cologne, the dry-cleaned wool of his coats. I slid into the driver's seat, adjusted the mirror down from his height, and pressed the start button.
The Bluetooth chimed.
I didn't think anything of it. His phone was on the kitchen counter. The car must have caught the signal through the wall.
Then the speakers came to life.
A woman's voice, slow and breathy, the kind of song you put on when you don't plan on listening to lyrics. The dashboard screen lit up in soft blue.
*Now Playing: Paige's Mix.*
I sat very still. My hands were on the wheel and my foot was on the brake and I could hear the song clearly—a saxophone, a lazy bassline—but my brain had stopped translating it into music.
Paige.
I told myself it could be anything. A coworker. A client. A name on a Spotify playlist someone shared at the office. People share playlists. Emmett liked jazz. The whole thing meant nothing.
I put the car in reverse.
The screen blinked.
*Recent Calls.*
It rotated on its own, the way the system does when it syncs—calendar, then calls, then messages. I should have looked away. I should have tapped the screen back to the map.
I didn't.
Paige W. Tuesday, 11:47 p.m. Forty-three minutes.
Paige W. Wednesday, 1:12 a.m. Twenty-six minutes.
Paige W. Thursday, 12:08 a.m. An hour and fourteen minutes.
The pharmacy was four blocks away. I drove there with my hands at exactly ten and two, the way they teach you in driver's ed when you're sixteen and your father is sitting beside you saying *good, good, good.* I parked under the buzzing fluorescent sign. I turned the engine off.
The screen went black.
I sat in that parking lot for eleven minutes. I know it was eleven because I watched the clock on the dash and counted each one as it changed. The message previews kept popping up at the top of the display every time his phone pinged something new from inside our house.
*can't stop thinking about*
*you looked so good last—*
*miss your*
I didn't open them. I didn't have to. The previews told me everything I needed to know in three words at a time, like a poem written in a language I had been pretending not to understand for a very long time.
A woman walked past my window pushing a stroller. She glanced in. I must have looked normal because she kept walking.
I went into the pharmacy. I picked up Mac's cough syrup and a box of tissues we didn't need and a pack of gum I would not chew. I paid in cash. The cashier asked if I wanted my receipt and I said yes, please, and folded it neatly into my wallet behind the others.
When I got home, Emmett was on the couch with one ankle on his knee, scrolling. He looked up and smiled—the easy, automatic smile he gave to clients and to me, indistinguishable now.
"That took a while."
"Line was long," I said. I set his keys in the dish by the door. "Mac, honey, come take your medicine."
That was Saturday.
---
By Sunday morning I had remembered the password.
Three years ago he'd given it to me—*for the family calendar, babe, just put it in your phone so you can see my travel*—and like everything else he handed me back then, I had filed it away without making a fuss. He had never changed it. Of course he hadn't. Changing it would have required imagining I might use it.
I waited until he took Mac to the diner for pancakes. Mom was watching her game show, the volume low. I sat at the kitchen table with my laptop and a cup of black coffee and I logged in.
The thread with Paige Watkins went back seven months.
I read it the way I used to read candidate files at the firm—top to bottom, no skipping, every detail catalogued. The flirty opener at a work retreat. The first late-night call. The first photo. The first time he told her he wished he could wake up next to her. The first time she said *your wife,* and the first time he answered *don't worry about her.*
Don't worry about her.
I wrote that one down on the legal pad next to the laptop. I underlined it once. Then I crossed it out and wrote it again, cleaner.
I cross-referenced her name through the recruiter portal I still had a dormant login for. Paige Watkins. Senior account manager at his firm. Two desks down from his office. Thirty-one. Single. There was a headshot. She had the kind of polished, deliberate beauty that costs money and time, and she was smiling at the camera the way women smile when they have decided what they want.
I closed the laptop.
I went down the hall to Mac's room. He'd left his stuffed dinosaur on the pillow, the one he was outgrowing but couldn't quite let go of. I stood in the doorway. The little plant on his windowsill—the pothos I bought him last spring—had put out a new leaf, pale green and curled tight.
I didn't cry. I noticed that I wasn't crying and I noticed that I wasn't surprised by it.
My reflection in his closet mirror looked like a woman I almost recognized.
---
I told Emmett that night, while he was packing for his Monday flight, that I wanted to come to Manhattan the next weekend.
He paused with a folded shirt in his hand. Just for a half-second. Then he smiled.
"Yeah? What's the occasion?"
"No occasion," I said. I leaned in the doorway with my arms folded loosely. "I miss you. I want to see your place. Birdie can come down and stay with Mom and Mac."
He set the shirt in the suitcase, very carefully. "Babe. That's—yeah. That'd be great. I'll clear my schedule."
"Don't clear too much," I said. "I'd love to see your world. Meet some of your people."
His throat moved.
"Sure," he said. "Whatever you want."
I smiled at him. It was the same smile I used to give clients when I was about to place them somewhere they didn't yet know they were going.
"Perfect," I said.
I walked back down the hall. In the kitchen, I rinsed his coffee cup and set it in the rack. Outside, the wind had picked up, and a single dry leaf scraped across the porch boards in the dark.
